PostGIS activity funding

This page outlines the recurring activities Paragon Corporation does for the PostGIS project and what we plan to do if we get funds earmarked for this work. We are looking for contributions of $100 or more towards our efforts. By funding our efforts, not only do you demonstrate your appreciation for our work, but also help us make it better. We accept payments via Visa, MasterCard, PayPal, or Check. If you are interested click on the relevant e-mail link and let us know how much you'd like to contribute as well as the particular areas you would like us to focus our efforts.

If you would prefer to make a monthly donation or a smaller donation per month, you can pay through Regina's Patreon account

Aside from our thank you, what do you get:

• We'll provide you a consulting invoice / receipt for your records
• If you provide $500 or more of funding, we'll include 2 hours of our consulting time to use however you wish, plus autographed copies of PostGIS in Action 2nd edition and PostgreSQL Up and running 2nd edition. Need help troubleshooting a pesky PostGIS query or configuring your PostGIS install on windows, we can help.

PostGIS Windows Build and Packaging Fund

One of the main activities we support is maintaining the PostGIS Windows buildbot and also doing the packaging for the Windows PostGIS stackbuilder (32/64 bit) distributions. This is something we'd like to spend a lot more time on improving and extending the support

This would help toward the following:

• Extending the drivers we include in GDAL library to include ODBC, SpatiaLite and others. This expands the number of formats you can import with raster2pgsql and also the number of formats you will be able to use with ogr_fdw (which we plan to include in PostGIS 2.2 packaging).
• Supporting more versions of PostgreSQL on newer PostGIS.
• Getting releases out more quickly and for every microversion. We tend to lag a bit since this is something we do in our spare time.
• Continued support and testing of additional goodies like pointcloud(and above), ogr_fdw, and extra testing of included packages like pgRouting.
• Paying more attention to buildbot failures and issues.

PostGIS Tiger Geocoder maintenance and work on next Geocoder

For PostGIS 2.0 we completely revamped the PostGIS Tiger Geocoder building from the work that Stephen Frost did and what was already there. Over the years we've upgraded it to handle newer versions of Tiger Data, improve performance and accuracy, to include newer functionality like a reverse_geocode function. This work was possible largely due to generous sponship of one of our clients. There are a couple of things not so great with the current geocoder incarnation we'd like to address

• Generally speaking keeping the system using the latest version of TIGER is not a zero sum time affair. This is because each year TIGER changes their structure ever so slightly. Which for the most part requires tiny changes to the loader script and lots of testing to make sure things weren't broken.
• Revise the normalizer it is based on to be more rule based and not specific to the US. This was partly started with work in PostGIS 2.2, to bring in an addresss_standardizer module.
• Next version which will not be TIGER specific. Make the geocoder structure not so tied to TIGER structure. This will make it possible to use with other data sources like OpenStreetMap and useable more globally. Next release will include loader scripts for both TIGER and OpenStreetMap.

PostGIS Improved Automated testing and augmented testing

Right now the PostGIS bots just do the standard packaged tests and do not even test all permutations (e.g. none test installing from extension or upgrading from a prior version of PostGIS or testing older versions of GEOS / JSON).

Funding this activity will allow the following:

• Augment this to do more strenuous testing like time testing to insure newer versions don't have adverse effects on performance
• More crash and regression tests. Right now this is a very manual process with running a "garden test" script and doing some diffs that is done at best during major release. This should be done for every microversion and be eventually automated.
• All variants of install/upgrade of PostGIS.
• Expand testing on more platforms. Right now testing is only done on Debian (Debbie Jenkins bot), Ubuntu (Travis) and Windows (Winnie Jenkins bot) and we don't have slave building setup to push tests to other servers/workstations let alone funds to support more bots.

PostGIS Improved Documentation

PostGIS documentation is weak in many areas.

Funding this activity will allow the following:

• For some functions there are no examples or very weak examples. We'll address these
• The non-function reference section of the PostGIS manual has fallen behind. For example there is no workbook like section that walks you thru where to get started using raster or PostGIS proper.
• Automate the pull of the translation work going on into the code base and have the translated documents build along-side the english versions.